Writing a multilayered article for the Journal of Digital History

Overview of the tutorial
The first issue of the
Journal of Digital History (JDH) went out in October 2021. A joint-venture with De Gruyter Publishingq group, the JDH is open access (no fees for authors) and encourages open data. Its distinctiveness is that it implements the concept of multilayered articles, that is based on a long-lasting history of thinking on the future of academic writings
(Darnton). This implementation is based on a specifically designed infrastructure based on open source software, with Jupyter notebooks at its heart. JDH’s articles are composed of three layers: a narrative layer (the presentation of the results of a research), an hermeneutics layer (exposing methodologies, uses of digital tools, and code), and a data layer (the dataset itself).

The tutorial will last 4 hours and will be divided into two parts. The first part (Two hours, including a break) will show the attendees how to set up their writing environment (

https://journalofdigitalhistory.org/en/guidelines
). This includes: installing jupyter notebooks and several extensions (nbextensions, cite2c), linking their writing environment to their Zotero account, setting up a github repository (optional, but strongly recommended).

After the familiarization with the environment, the second part will focus on how to write an article and preview it on the JDH front-end  (

https://journalofdigitalhistory.org/en/notebook-viewer-form
- for this interface, using a github repo is mandatory).

For both parts, it is mandatory that attendees come with their own computer with administrator’s rights. It is strongly recommended that they have their own data and have a draft article (whatever the journal they intend to publish in) using this dataset in view.

Learning outcomes

understanding the concept of multilayered article,
setting up a writing environment that allows interaction with a dataset through code,
testing their article in the JDH viewer.

Beyond the use of the Journal of Digital History, we aim at showing concretely an alternative way to publish in the digital era, a topic that is fully belonging to Digital Humanities
(Fitzpatrick; Vitali-Rosati et Sinatra).

Timeline
Introduction (5 minutes)
The Journal of Digital History and the concept of multilayered article (10 minutes)

First part
Setting up a writing environment (1) (40 minutes)

installation of jupyter notebooks / lab
installation of nbextensions / cite2c

break (10 minutes)
Setting up your writing environment (2) (50 minutes)

linking your jupyter installation to Zotero through cite2c
using GitHub (optional)

Overview of the main functionalities of notebooks
break (10 minutes)

Second part
Presenting the guidelines of the JDH (including the specific JDH tagging system, 20 minutes)
Presenting the Jupyter Notebook JDH template (10 minutes)
Creating and syncing your repo on GitHub (10 minutes)
Preparing your bibliography on Zotero (10 minutes)
break (10 minutes)
Writing session (45 minutes)

Including article preview on the JDH.

Wrap up (15 minutes)

Workshop instructors and leaders

Frédéric Clavert is assistant professor in contemporary history and managing editor of the Journal of Digital History. His research are recently focusing on collective memory and social media, as well as on the changing relationships between historians and their primary sources in the digital era.

Elisabeth Guérard is working on the JDH project as an application developer.

Mirjam Pfeiffer is a User Experience and User Interaction Designer, working full time on the Journal of Digital History.

Target audience
We target researchers, mostly but not exclusively historians, who have an experience in writing code to exploit their data but have not yet found a satisfactory way to expose their methods, tools, code and data.
We expect a number of participants around 10 on site. In November 2021, we held a workshop at the French conference DHNord in Lille that aroused some interest, with a smaller audience than the DH conferences’. Aside from that workshop, we also organised several workshops online (Nebraska Lincoln, University of Sussex). Evaluating how many people will attend online is more difficult.
The JDH’s team hopes that this tutorial will give them the occasion to meet and deepen their links to the Asian DH community.

Bibliography
Darnton, R. (1999). “The New Age of the Book”.
New York Times.

Fitzpatrick, K. (2011). Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: New York University Press.
Vitali-Rosati, M. and Sinatra, M. eds.
Pratiques de l’édition numérique, Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2014.